Saturday, August 25, 2007

iPhoto '08 - Events, but you can't Crop

For the most part I am a big promoter of all things Apple. They continue to innovate and build great products. Apple has made my life easier many times in the past and for that I thank them. All evidence so far points to iPhoto '08 being completely unusable.

My photo needs are meager. Crop, rotate, a twist of brightness or color enhancement - combined with the ability to share with friends and family on Flickr make me happy. Unfortunately, iPhoto '08 can't crop on my machine and I don't know what I'm going to do. I've got a macbook that is less than a year old. I of course maxed out the memory to 2GB. Just opening iPhoto and doing nothing takes up 318MB of memory. My CPU spikes up to 48% according to Activity Monitor without doing anything. All of this may be fine, but when I try to crop a picture, I now am presented with a box in the middle of my picture that I have to drag, resize, and move. When I drag the corners of this box, both CPUs spike up to 100% and the machine becomes laggy. If I need to resize this box one, two, or three times in a row, I need to wait for perhaps a full minute for this operation to complete. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Grrr. I just opened iPhoto, flipped between events to photos (to see how many I have), then back to photos. Now iPhoto is pegged at using 70% of both cores. Again, I am doing nothing. I don't know what I am going to do. The new iMovie is designed so you can make a video in a snap. How about focusing on cropping a photo in a snap. This is crazy.